Revolutie in de schoolgang: Radicaal-romantische Bildung in en buiten het onderwijs tussen 1789 en nu

This book started with the insight of a student, also named Joris, during a philosophy lesson about Foucault. He realized how much there was, that did not even occur to him anymore to do in the school corridor. He had adapted so well to the existing rules that he censored the thought of dancing or singing, even before that thought could arise. That paradoxical insight, the realization of something that cannot be realized, turned out to be a fitting illustration of the unfreedom of thought and the lack of alternative options, which not only make the school career an ordeal for many students, but which today also affects the discussion about economics, about politics or about education: the legacy of decades in which the message was invariably that there was no alternative to the prevailing neoliberal policies.

In the first chapter, Bildung, the eighteenth-century ideal of self-formation, turned out to owe its recent popularity in and outside education mainly to the fact that it was seen as a solution to that problem, as an alternative for a time without alternatives. At the same time, the ideal in its classic, depoliticized form turned out not to be able to live up to those high expectations. The question that initially guided my research was therefore whether and how a more politically involved Bildung was conceivable.

The biggest surprise of my research was that this politically involved Bildung had actually been there from the start, but that it was subsequently erased from the history books. Wilhelm von Humboldt is known as the founder of the classical Bildungideal, but what is not widely known is that he borrowed many ideas from Georg Forster. The second chapter reconstructs the story of their friendship and the political differences which ended it. The reason Forster fell into disfavor, not only with Humboldt but throughout Germany, was that in 1792 he became involved in a short-lived democratic revolution in Mainz. Hence, the break-up of their friendship was also a break between two philosophies of Bildung: a politically radical Bildung and a classical humanist Bildung.

In the third chapter I outline Forster's life and his radical philosophy of Bildung, on the basis of a number of closely related features: the tension between natural history and Geistesgeschichte, the trope of allegory, his ideal of collective formation and his political commitment, for example against the ‘scientific’ racism of Kant and other thinkers of his time. In the fourth chapter, I discuss the most radical period of his life and writings, when after 1792 he became involved in the short-lived revolution that turned the city of Mainz into a democratic republic on the French model. It was also the time when he wrote a series of essays, in which he linked Bildung and revolution. As a result of these radical views and actions, Forster has been vilified, neglected and subsequently silenced in German cultural history. Recent revaluations also tend either to ignore the revolutionary charge of his late work, to distance themselves from it or to retroactively deradicalize him.

In his classical period, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), like his good friend Humboldt, regarded gradual, natural Bildung as the only ‘healthy’ answer and antidote to the French Revolution. In the fifth chapter I reconstruct his anti-revolutionary philosophy of Bildung, on the basis of the colossal classicist staircase that he himself designed for his house in Weimar: a staircase that had to rise so gradually, that you would not notice it. In the same way, he presented Bildung as a linear staircase, in literary works such as Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, which should convey the citizen step by step and without shocks to his appropriate place in the established order. He condemned the tendency of the revolutionary Forster and the romantics to spurn this gradual motion and jump down the stairs.

However, he continued to wrestle with the spirit of his late friend Forster in plays, poems and conversations. Later in life, he regretted his stairs, which had cost him his living space. He also distanced himself from his classicism and acknowledged that sometimes in life, you really have to make a leap. The chapter illustrates how desperately the representatives of the classical ideal of Bildung tried to distance themselves from Forster and radical romanticism.

The first revolutionary romantics make their entrance in the sixth and seventh chapters: Caroline Böhmer (1763-1809), who was infected by Forster’s commitment in revolutionary Mainz, and the young Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), who fell madly in love with her and adopted both her political beliefs and her ironic style. In literary histories, it has been presented time and again as if the Frühromantiker did not want to make a political revolution, only a poetic one, but that turns out to be untrue: Böhmer and Schlegel had surprisingly radical views, especially at a time when conservative repression in Germany was increasing. Schlegel made an attempt to restore Forster's honor and provided an allegorical critique of the classic model of Bildung in Wilhelm Meister, which offers starting points for an alternative and less linear pedagogy.

In the eighth chapter, I discuss Humboldt’s ideal of Bildung, based on his works and letters, but also on his castle in Tegel, which he transformed into Berlin's first museum of Greek antiquities, just as he hellenized himself and his family. His classical philosophy of Bildung was not just about free self-cultivation, but also about purposeful self-ennoblement according to a Greek ideal. While German class society was in decline around him, Humboldt’s love for the Greeks and for the gymnasium marked the transformation of Bildung into the self-legitimation of a bourgeois-aristocratic Geistesadel, in other words: a way of thinking that maintained the prevailing social inequality. Traces of this way of thinking can still be found in the idea of meritocracy, of which Humboldt was one of the first advocates and with which current education continues to struggle. The chapter shows how Bildung, like education itself, can have a conservative as well as a revolutionary effect.

In the ninth chapter, I elaborate on the image of the school corridor, based on the corridors in Walter Benjamin’s old Berlin school, which played a leading role in his childhood memories (and in his nightmares). He himself interpreted those corridors as an allegorical image that revealed what was wrong, not only with his school but also with the education of his time and with classical Bildung. On the other hand, precisely by way of his allegorical interpretation of the corridors, he showed the possibility of a different way of reading and thinking and a different self-formation in education.

In the tenth chapter, I discuss one of the most influential attempts of the last ten years to critically reorient the ideal of Bildung: the postmodern philosophy of education of Gert Biesta (1957). In The Beautiful Risk of Education (2015), Biesta is inspired by Caputo and Derrida and indirectly by Benjamin. Although this philosophy provides valuable insights, it tends, like the classical tradition of Bildung, to reduce political issues to ethical and aesthetic issues. Whereas Biesta cites the ‘weak force’ to indicate how teachers can support students in their process of subjectification, Benjamin’s concept refers precisely to the emancipatory and rebellious capacity that students themselves possess. Biesta introduces civil rights activist Rosa Parks to emphasize how important it is that the ‘selft’ is given space to develop, but he misunderstands the collective and political nature of her actions. Ultimately, Parks is much closer to the revolutionary tradition of Böhmer, Schlegel and Benjamin than to the moralizing approach of Caputo and Biesta.
This book is not a blueprint for the application of this alternative tradition of Bildung in daily teaching practices, let alone for a revolutionary reorganization of education. I simply want to demonstrate the possibility of a different way of thinking by putting it into practice myself, writing as I do about the philosophy and history of Bildung. That is to say: by questioning a one- sided and idealist narrative about Bildung that has been repeated ad nauseam in cultural history, philosophy and pedagogy. In the same way, I tell my students that the narratives I and my colleagues present at school are never definitive, that with every full stop or comma an alternative twist is possible and perhaps even desperately needed.
To dispel the idea that this book could just be another reflection on cultural history or cultural philosophy, I return in the eleventh and final chapter to my series of lessons on Foucault, with which this the entire study began. Not to recommend that project as a suitable application of the philosophy that is developed here, because in this case my practice took precedence over theory. The aim of this last chapter is, firstly, to reflect on those lessons and on the current educational questions they touch, with the help of the radical-romantic thinkers of Bildung: how critical thinking is possible in the classroom, how writing education can be liberated and whether and how education can make a social difference. Secondly, it is an invitation to those readers who are in the classroom or lecture hall to bring the ideas from this book into dialogue with their own daily teaching practice.
That is why, as the title suggests, this book can be read as the reconstruction of a certain radical-romantic tradition of Bildung, which emerged in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century and was almost immediately suppressed, but also as a reflection on the meaning and relevance of that tradition today, in and outside education.